Predictors of Advertising Avoidance in Print and Broadcast Media

By Paul Surgi Speck, Michael T. Elliott

Multichannel

"Advertising in broadcast media is more likely to be avoided than print advertising."

Source: Journal of Advertising Research, Fall 1997, 26(3), pgs. 61-76.

Type of Promotional Material/Activity Tested: Magazines, newspapers, radio, TV

Sample:  946 U.S. households from the National Family Opinion's (NFO) national consumer panel.

Study Method: Mailed questionnaire

Metrics:  Predictive modeling used to examine consumer perceptions of newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio and the advertising in each medium.
 

Independent variables: 
 

• Demographics (age, income, ethnicity, education, household size, marital status, gender, and employment status)
  
  
• Media measures (use, attitude towards)
  
  
• Ad perceptions (e.g., believable/not believable, interesting/not interesting)
  
  
• Communication problems ads cause (interference, disruption, distraction)
  

Dependent variable(s):
 

• Ad avoidance (ignoring ads, flipping past ads, eliminating ads)

Top Line Results:

• Ad avoidance is highest for TV.  Viewers say they are experiencing increased clutter (growing number of channels, programming) and tape programs to skip commercials interfering with their program viewing. 
  
  
• Print ads are seen as most reliable and useful for they contain more specific information than broadcast commercials. 
  
  
• Feelings of being aggravated and/or unconvinced are highest for TV and radio ads.
  
  
• Radio ads rank as the most distracting of the four mediums, possibly because of the attention getting strategies of radio ads (fast talk, increased volume, etc.).  Print ads, on the other hand, are not found to be distracting.  This suggests ads placed next to content do not interfere with the reader engagement or lead to avoidance behaviors.
  
  
• Magazine and newspaper ads that are most engaging are those considered interesting, believable, or useful, and ones that don’t overwhelm the editorial content with their quantity.  Interference with content due to excessiveness and uninteresting ads are the strongest predictors of ad avoidance in print media.
  
  
• Younger readers are less likely to avoid print ads than older readers are.  This may be because older readers tend to read newspapers more often, and are exposed to the same ads on a regular basis, thus finding the advertising “old."
   

Take-Away: Advertising in broadcast media is more likely to be avoided than print advertising.  Though this research was completed more than 10 years ago, it presages the recent interest in measuring “engagement”.  This study finds that print ads are less aggravating and more believable than ads in other media. 

Complexity rating of original source: 2
(Complex statistical analysis scale:  1= none, 2= moderate, 3 = difficult)